In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses.

I dreamt that Debbie (whom I have never met in person in real life) was at my house looking through one of my copies of the Book of Mormon -- one with the text in Chinese characters, transliterated Chinese, and English in three parallel columns.

After reading a few pages, she said, "There seems to be a lot of overlap with Christianity."

"Well, yeah. It is a form of Christianity."

"So this Savior from America is somehow the same as Jesus Christ from the Middle East?"

"It's not a Savior from America, it's Jesus coming to America."

She read a little more and then said, "Second Isaiah? What's that?"

I looked at the book to see what she was talking about.

"There's no Second Isaiah. That's a footnote. The two doesn't mean 'second'; it means it's footnote 2. The authors lived after Isaiah, and they quote him a lot, so they have footnotes referring you back to him."

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In real life, English editions of the Book of Mormon use letters rather than numbers for footnotes, and my bilingual copy doesn't have footnotes at all.

The current consensus of biblical scholars is that there is a Second Isaiah -- that Isaiah son of Amoz only wrote the first 39 chapters of the work that bears his name, with the chapters 40-55 attributed to a hypothetical anonymous author dubbed Deutero-Isaiah (with the prefix meaning "second"), who lived some two centuries later, and the remainder to an even later Trito-Isaiah. Mormons on the other hand, typically reject this hypothesis because Deutero-Isaiah would have lived too late for the Book of Mormon authors to have had access to his work, and yet they do quote from those later chapters of Isaiah. So while my comments -- "There's no Second Isaiah . . . The authors lived after Isaiah" -- are ostensibly explaining the meaning of a footnote, they also seem to address a well-known Book of Mormon controversy.

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In a second dream segment, I was staying at a hotel in New York City with a large number of traveling companions. When we arrived at the hotel, everyone wanted to try out the pool immediately, even though we were all wearing business clothes. Several people just jumped into the pool fully clothed, while others just waded a bit in the shallows. One man who was neck-deep in the water was wearing an expensive-looking watch, and someone asked him if he was sure it was waterproof.

After that, we went to a big courtyard, like a little park surrounded by the hotel building. I wanted to sit on a bench and read. I didn't want to read on my phone, but the only physical book I had with me was a very large hardcover copy of The Godfather by Mario Puzo (a book I've never read in real life). So I took that with me to one of the benches in the courtyard and sat down to read. Others sat on other benches.

There were several dumpsters in the courtyard, and while we were there a garbage truck arrived to empty them. It did this by means of a mechanism that lifted the dumpster up and turned it upside down, letting the trash fall into the open back of the truck (like a dump truck). It was a windy day, and bits of lightweight trash blew everywhere. Everyone was trying to avoid it and brushing bits of it off their clothes.

One of my traveling companions said, "I thought you said that in America they pick up the garbage very early in the morning to avoid disturbing anyone."

"I guess it's different in New York City," I said. "New York may be too big for that system to work."

"It seems that in New York they have no problem picking up forbidden stuff, like paper," said a woman. She meant that paper is recyclable and that throwing it away without recycling it is "forbidden" in some places, but apparently not in New York.

Someone who was not part of our group, but seemed to be a New Yorker, explained: "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses. Sunglasses are so popular that they always assume you threw them away by mistake and won't take them -- unless you get a sharpie and write trash on them. Or you can write murder."

"Murder?"

"It means the guy who owned the sunglasses got murdered, so that's why you're throwing them away."'

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That last bit, about throwing away the sunglasses of the murder victim, reminded me of a sync from a couple of weeks back, which I didn't post at the time because I was taking a break.

On December 21, I listened to John Dehlin's five-hour interview with recently excommunicated polygamy denier Karen Hyatt.

About halfway through the interview (my quote below begins at 2:28:37), Mrs. Hyatt discusses the implications of her position for today's church. Joseph Smith was a true prophet and a good man, while his immediate successor Brigham Young was neither -- but, she says, that doesn't necessarily undermine the authority of all subsequent church leaders, since an "unbroken line of authority" is not essential.

Most people have it lined up as a domino effect, right? The Book of Mormon, they know that's true. They can feel it. So they believe that Joseph Smith is a prophet. I think that's reasonable because that's his fruit. So I don't think God would give us the Book of Mormon through an evil person. I just don't. So those make sense to me. Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith -- but then you have this domino effect: Well, if Joseph Smith, then Brigham Young, and John Taylor came third we know, and Wilford, you know, Lorenzo Snow, and all the things. It's like, so those are assumptions, right?

Jesus never said, "Ye shall know them by their unbroken line of authority." Like, he never said that. That would have been a lot simpler for us to identify a true prophet, is this unbroken line of authority if it existed. He didn't say that. He said, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." So if you want to look back in church history, or currently, and find out who's a prophet, look at their fruits. It's as simple as that.

We have a story in the Book of Mormon about King Noah. Okay, this is a really important story. You've got King Noah, and it says when he got to be king, he put down all the priests his father had consecrated and put new ones in their stead who were idolatrous and lazy and had many wives and concubines. Okay, so we have this, there is no unbroken line of authority to King Noah's priests. He got rid of the ones that you could argue were in the line, and he chucked them and put new ones. No line of authority, no unbroken chain there. You can't argue that. And yet, one of those priests who did not have a demonstrable line of authority -- anyway, you know, maybe there's something that we're not being told, but you can't argue it from the scriptures -- one of those wicked priests, Alma, runs off, repents, and is given power and authority from God to lead his church. That's a key central story in the Book of Mormon. God called him because of his repentance and desire to follow Christ. He didn't call him from some line of authority.

So why do we have to have that? Why is it a big deal if Brigham Young -- and some people think Brigham Young was deceived, he made a mistake, whatever, however you want to explain the fact that he really did do polygamy -- again, I'm not going to attribute motive -- but if he turns out to be a King Noah, who was wicked and didn't have power and authority from God, but did all these things, so what? Like, take him  out of it. That's fine. All the subsequent leaders of the church, judge them by the way Christ says to: by their fruits.

At this point I took a short break from listening to the interview. One of the things I did during the break was check something on archive.org, and as usual I got a random /x/ thread en route. In the random thread I got (the address of which I unfortunately neglected to save), I found this image:

That's a picture of the Spanish comedian El Risitas laughing, with the caption:

With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.

This is apparently the message you get in one of the Elder Scrolls video games if you kill an "essential NPC" without whom it is impossible for you to complete your quest. It may (I didn't save the link and can't check the date) have been posted shortly after the 2021 death of El Risitas, humorously implying that the world is now doomed without him.

In synchronistic context, though, "the thread of prophecy is severed" sounds a lot like Karen Hyatt's comments about there being no "unbroken line of authority" from one prophet to the next, and the "death" referred to must be that of Joseph Smith. "Restore" is also a word closely associated with Smith's prophetic work.

Emblematic of Joseph Smith's work as a seer is his use of the Nephite interpreters -- later dubbed the Urim and Thummin, but originally referred to as "spectacles" and thus sunglasses-adjacent. In the dream, no one inherits a murder victim's sunglasses; they're just thrown away. If "the thread of prophecy is severed," no one inherits the seeric role of the murdered prophet; it's just gone.

Tying this back to the first dream, I suppose "There's no Second Isaiah" also refers to a murdered prophet -- Isaiah was supposedly sawn in half inside a hollow tree -- having no successor.